We give money because they still have good value proposition.

Or we forget to cancel

Does Netflix still have that pretty cool feature where they paused your subscription if you didn't use it for a few months? It was very cool seeing it happen when I had my Netflix account!

they stopped my neflix streaming, because I didn't use it as much.

And just recently they stopped my dvd service because there's no market for people like me. 9I was actively using - it had access to all the good movies)

I can't help but think of temple grandin and comfortably guiding cattle to the "endgame"

https://www.grandin.com/design/curved.handling.facilities.ht...

I think most of these services should just not charge you if, during any given payment period, you don't use the service. If I go to the trouble of canceling I'm likely not coming back; especially since the friction for re-subscribing is higher than just logging in and it automatically being 'unpaused'. I'm also more likely to cancel a service if I haven't used it for three months and see its cost me $60 just to have.

Back in dvd shipping era I found myself with netflix subscription that I didn't use for a very very long time. I asked if they can give me some credits or discounts or anything really. The answer was no. They never got another cent from me since.

Bundled w/T-Mobile

Hello imchillyb

Netflix feels like they made a very bad bet that their technology was some sort of leading advantage (which was silly because if BitTorrent exists then fairly obviously...no it wasn't).

It has the advantage over torrent that you don’t have to hide yourself behind a VPNs to keep from getting sued for illegal doings.

On other hand you needed VPN to get interesting content... So quite a wash, I don't know where they are now with geoblocking.

The point is that if an ad hoc distributed network of unfunded peers can do it, the barrier to entry is not that high for any well funded major enterprise which wants a slice of the pie.

Basically I'd be curious to know if they felt internally that they'd transition to a service provider or something if they had to.

The plethora of streaming services suggest you’re correct in the barrier not being that high.

That's not a technology moat, that's a copyright moat.

Presumably by competitors and alternatives, you aren't strictly referring to streaming platforms. What of it? People still want to stream film and tv, and among legal platforms Netflix is still tops.

Could be that they don't use internet so they have no idea how to get those cheaper options.

I agree that there are competitors but I think the obvious answer is that Netflix has content.

There is a laundry list of specific shows that have a wide following on Netflix.

Here’s a list of 100 critically acclaimed ones: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-netflix-show...

They’re starting to do live sports as well, like NFL games.

I would say that all the major streaming services are gradually becoming roughly equal.